


Tensionamento

by Stultiloquentia



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Jack's giant nutcracker hands, Massage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-07-19 18:09:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7372180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stultiloquentia/pseuds/Stultiloquentia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seven hours hunched over a drafting table is bad choices.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tensionamento

**Author's Note:**

  * For [staranise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/staranise/gifts).



By the time Lardo gives up and puts down her pens, the morning drizzle has settled into a cold and steady afternoon rain. Her back aches, her fingers are cramping, and she doesn't even like any of the studies she's produced today. She packs up with a sigh, then drags her feet by the entrance of the student center, considering her options. Library: close, quiet, could maybe kickstart her English paper. Dorms: close-ish, gloomy, gotta head there at some point anyway. Haus: across the river; might have pie. Pie might salvage the day. She grits her teeth, pulls up her hood, and dashes for the bridge. 

She half expects the place to be empty when she arrives; most of the boys are out on Thursdays and head straight to the caf in a big, noisy pack for dinner. Someone's puttering in the kitchen, though. Lardo sheds her coat and boots and heads through to find Jack, probably on a break from crunching through his thesis in his bedroom. He's wearing gray sweatpants and a gray hoodie and orange socks, and he's drying mugs and putting them in the cupboard above the coffee pot. He looks over as she enters, shoots her a half smile, but doesn't speak. 

"Tell me there's pie," Lardo mutters. 

"Blueberry, maybe?" She's already found it, pulled it onto the counter, and obtained a fork. The plates are on the second shelf, though, and Lardo lets out a little yelp as she reaches for one, coming back down onto her heels with a thump. Jack turns and watches her retrieve a plate with her other arm. 

"Productive morning?" he asks mildly.

Lardo stares at the quarter pie left in the pan, then carries the whole thing over to the table and hunches over it, abandoning the plate on the counter. Jack, never one to force a conversation, goes back to his drying. Lardo takes a bite of Bitty's artistry, closes her eyes, and sighs. 

Until Jack catfoots up behind her and pokes her trapezius muscle with two deadly accurate fingers. She hisses. "Jesus," says Jack. "Come upstairs." He scoops her messenger bag off the chair beside her and slings it over his shoulder, then swipes the entire pie pan out from under her. Looks at her with his eyebrows raised. Damned captain.

"Hey," Lardo protests feebly.

"You've been in studio since seven-thirty, haven't you? You feel like a sack of walnuts."

"You're a walnut."

He just waggles his giant, manly, nutcracker hands at her and says, "Are you coming?"

Any other guy, asking her that after inviting her up to his bedroom in his otherwise empty house, would get an epic chirping for that, and, depending on whether she liked him, maybe a smart slap on the ass. Jack's different, though; has been pretty much since they met.

"You sure?" she asks, following his ass up the narrow staircase. "Don't wanna keep you from the thesis."

"Nah, I'm over my goal for the day."

"Fucking nerd."

Jack chuckles. She knows he secretly likes the epithet. He's been a fucking jock to strangers for most of his life; he likes that his friends see something different.

Lardo shucks her cargo pants as soon as she's in Jack's room, and tugs her shirt clumsily over her head on her way to his bed, wincing at the pull. They haven't done this since before Kenya, when Lardo fucked up her shoulder playing badminton, of all damned things. "I told you not to fill your PE requirement that way," Jack had scolded her, apparently in earnest. "Badminton is a vicious sport."

It's flannel sheet season. Jack's are red and gray plaid, and amazingly soft, and smell faintly of Tiger Balm and boy. Lardo stretches out happily in her underwear, making herself at home. 

Jack rummages in his dresser and comes up with a tiny bottle of oil, which he fiddles with shyly for a second before handing it over for Lardo's inspection. She grins up at him. "Oh my God, you are a fucking nerd!" 

He blushes. "I picked it up last semester. I figured I might as well; it's better than hand lotion...."

"You're a Boy Scout. Were you ever a Boy Scout?" 

"Euh, no."

He comes over and sits next to her on the bed. She hands him his grapeseed oil. "Do you want—" He touches her bra strap with one finger, and Lardo says, "Yeah," and reaches back to pop the clasp. She wiggles out of her bra and drops it on the sheet next to her, then wraps her arms back around Jack's pillow. Jack spins the cap off the oil, drizzles a little into his palm, and reaches down to touch her.

Lardo squeaks, and Jack snatches his hand back. "Sorry, sorry. Poor circulation." He clamps his fists under his own armpits for a minute, then pours out another few drops of oil and rubs his palms together vigorously. Then he's back, starting at her shoulders and sweeping two long, parallel lines down either side of her spine. Lardo groans in approval. He does a second pass, spreading the oil and slowing down to locate her problem spots, probing gently and knowledgeably as a man who's spent his fair share of hours sitting around in chiropractors' offices, staring at diagrams on the walls.

Then he swings one knee over her hips and settles in, so gracefully that the bed doesn't even bounce. His thighs are long enough, and Lardo's hips narrow enough, that he doesn't even brush against her.

"You can sit on my butt," she tells him.

Jack laughs quietly and demurs. "Trying to fix you, not break you." He's so strong, she supposes he could perch there, spring-loaded over his own bunched quads, all afternoon without a tremor, so she subsides and lets herself sink into the mattress. Jack sets to work, kneading deeply, methodically, with the heels of his palms. At the edge of her delt, something shifts with an audible pop, and Lardo's, "Oh fuck, there," mingles with Jack's muttered little, "Aha!"

He covers his thumb with his opposite palm, presses and rolls, and Lardo goes limp.

Lardo shuts her eyes and drifts, stirring herself only to mumble an occasional, "Yeah," or, "A bit higher?" but mostly just breathing and listening to the patter of the rain in the gutters and on the shingles of the reading room. Warmth seeps into her, and tension leeches out. Even the parts of her Jack's not touching, like her jaw, and her knees, and her headachey temples, feel better. Part of it is that Jack knows what he's doing, but part of it's just that it feels so good to be touched, skin to skin, by a friend, without expectation, after a long, bothersome day.

Jack is good at silence, and his touch is steady and easy. He sits back once to shed his hoodie, and when Lardo cracks one eye open she finds him floppy-haired in a plain, white undershirt. He's a beautiful guy. The light from his window is a romantic, muted gray, softening his angular features and skimming across the curves of his biceps. She loves him fiercely. 

"You're my dude," she tells him.

"You're my dude," says Jack.

He shifts a little higher over her body so he can set his fingers against Lardo's neck and rub in tiny, probing circles, up and down, and scritching lightly at her nape while Lardo rolls her forehead against Jack's pillow and moans. After another minute, Jack folds his hands over the tops of her traps, digging with his thumbs and running light fingers over her collarbones. Close to her ear, he rumbles, "D'you want me to—lower? Sometimes that spot gets..." His fingers skim beneath her collarbones and press a little, and the pressure on her upper pectorals feels good. She hadn't even realized there was tightness there.

"Yes please. Should I—" she asks as she starts to lift herself up off her stomach.

"Whatever you want." His warmed hands cup her shoulders. "I promise I won't look."

"Jack," Lardo huffs. "I _know_. But you can, don't even worry about it." She sits all the way up, exposed to the room and, in theory, Jack, who is certainly tall enough to peer over her shoulder and get an eyeful of her breasts. But there's no reason in the world to be shy or wary of him, and a second later she feels his forehead come to rest on the back of her head. His slow breaths through his nose ruffle her hair, and his long fingers resume their massage, never dipping into boob territory, but slowly working the upper musculature of her chest into pliant harmony. Soon enough he pulls back up, works across the top of her back and squeezes her deltoids. Smoothes his hands up and down her arms. In unison, they sigh.

Jack's hands drift away. Lardo rolls her neck and shoulders experimentally, then clasps her hands together and lifts them high above her head. Jack drops her t-shirt on her head, and Lardo snorts. "Naked time over," she agrees. She tugs it on, and wanders over to Jack's desk to retrieve the pie. Settles back on the bed with her back to the wall, knocks her shoulder into Jack's, and offers him first turn with the fork.

**Author's Note:**

> (Lardo accidentally leaves her bra in Jack’s bed. He considers washing it before returning, because that seems like good manners, but he’s vaguely aware that women’s lingerie has Special Laundry Rules, and he decides it’s better not to risk messing up. Instead, he hands it back in full view of half the hockey team while they're all milling around downstairs. Nobody knows how to interpret this, and nobody dares ask, so it just sort of gets written off by unspoken consensus as a mass hallucination.)


End file.
